tsm have one carry and a supporting cast. i don't think changing turtle to keith changes that. i don't think that they're a good enough team in NA with this BJERGUS mindset they have that they'd have a remote prayer in international competition unless they step the Firk up. even when faker was carrying skt k, his teammates could all potentially go off and make sick plays too. largely because of his pressure? sure, but they had more than just faker. tsm is bjergson, cc, vision, and tower pushers
I dont watch anywhere near as much as I used to but I have always pulled for CLG since season 1. Their inconsistancy has always been frustrating though.
CLG is, from both a management and ingame performance, truly pathetic Then again, HSGG is about the dumbest **** on business I've ever seen. Keeps claiming NA has no talent, but at the same time doesn't ever look beyond NA to pick up players, everyone else keeps picking up talent in NA that's better than what he has. Like Xmithie, really? Unbelievable weak jungler. How long was link in that team before link himself decided to leave, instead of kicking the guy for a poor performance of 2 years?? Just so incredibly poorly managed. Multiple people getting out of clg saying the atmosphere (doublelift) is beyond toxic. They get one of the best coaches in the world in MonteChristo last year, but apparently never listen to him and do their own thing, because Firk it why not. The rest of the team is about sound as a player, but either has no clue how to play the game (doublelift) or can't shotcall/strategise(everyone else). They lose games to bottom teames because they can't draft for Bane Shift. It infuriates me to see how HSGG and DL hold everything down because they're pretty little kids who are stuck in season 2, thinking they're all that and know it all. /rant
I really don't understand how this is true at all. Riot spends an incredible amount of time and money directly for "player experiences" and has one of the most player friendly revenue models around. They literally have entire divisions that are dedicated to things that are solely about improving player experience. You may or may not like or agree with the things they have done in terms of specifics, but it's a pretty stretch to argue all they care about is money. In fact, one of their primary tenets is that the player experience comes first (honestly, this is a kind of "company culture kool-aid" that rubs off on you even just talking briefly with people). I know a lot of people who work at Riot, and the vast majority love working there. Of course not everyone will fit in, that's always the case when you get a bunch of people working together. They even have a policy in place where if you can leave... WITH BONUS PAY of up to 25k, if you don't like there within 60 days. This is pretty much unheard of. Heck, if even Riot doesn't deserve your respect, I can't imagine any gaming company having your respect.
Gotta agree with Sokolov on this. My experiences with Riot customer support has even been above par. Their game does a wonderful job of leaning players towards vanity items instead of things actually needed for gameplay.
You mean the company that left major bugs unfixed in New Vegas, Oblivion and Skyrim and just pooped out crappy DLC? So much so people started calling the company Bugthesda? (I am not making these claims personally, but just saying they have their own set of detractors.)
You mean how they screwed over Deficio, nearly forcing him to stay as a caster because he can't join any team in any role until 2018 because he was in talks with CW about management position and didn't tell Riot? Because you'd surely tell your employer when you're in talks with another employer, surely? Or how people have to sign NDA's just to get inside the riot offices? How ghostcrawler just happened to remove his whole site after getting a job at riot? How riot didn't give two ****s about Kori in MYM getting screwed over by management and they made MYM pay a 5k fine... which kori payed to the management? Makes fining someone for being in talks with CW management seem fine. Meanwhile, there's still no player union whatsoever even though a lot of players are still getting screwed over. Every month there's leaks of management not paying, not providing etc etc. Latest being CW. Then there's MYM, there was the whole Lemondogs-NIP debacle. They do not seem the slightest bit interested in having their pro players treated the way they should be, as long as it doesn't directly affect Riot themselves. Because don't you dare be in talks about a management position without us knowing, because you'll get banned from casting for 4 weeks, banned from casting games of said organisation and we will not recognize you for any position in league of legends teams until 2018. Honestly. I could go on and on. And how exactly are they "player experience first"? They have an incredibly poor client, servers that are sill wonky, a full coast in NA that has less ping in LAN than locally, no replay system, etc. What have they done the last year? Pumped out new skins, some new game modes, a new automatic tribunal, new champs and chroma skins? People made chrome skins in 30 minutes for a champ after it was announced, it was literally that much of a moneygrab. Some of it is nice, but saying that they're clearly focussing on "player experience first", is a bridge too far. There's a dozen third party sites out there with replay systems, it can't be that hard. I'm not saying that people who work at Riot are demons, I've talked to some of them and they seem like ace people. I'm just saying that as a whole, riots policies and actions seem more focused on making money and being the biggest esport, then actually making a great game and putting the customer first. I've been following it for a couple of years from close up now, and while I do love league of legends as a game, and I love watching LCS and seeing the players and the casters, and they're all amazing dudes/girls, the decisions made by Riot as a company towards it's customers and players just does not convince me that they have their best interest at heart. Their own employees, as you pointed out, could be a different thing entirely, though the Deficio stunt makes me doubt that. But I don't know enough of what goes on inside Riot to make an informed argument about it. Though I'm sure they'll want to attract the most dedicated/talented people to work for them, as fits their prestige as the number one online game and esport right now. Anyhow, rant over. I need to think about my blood pressure.
You get 3 refunds (content for RP). Which isn't a full refund. Then again, they do change skins and champs around from time to time, I can imagine people who one-trick-pony on some needing these when stuff goes down. It's a great feature nonetheless. In a poor client with no replay system connected to fickle servers.
i thought it was pendragon who had the (dotans?) website he took down after getting hired? and ghostcrawler was ex-blizz? also i didn't really get the deficio thing. what's the potential issue with having someone with a personal stake cast what is clearly the worst team in EU? also is the NDA thing really on the same level? i'd be worried about floods of randoms if i were them, having a shield against the flood of kappas seems reasonable to me
oops, pendragon, my bad as far as I know, signing NDA's just to enter a business is not common/healthy practice. Perhaps it's different in the US, but I've been in a couple bigbig companies, and while you have to check and badge up, signing NDA's is quite... extreme.
it's more than i'd expect, yeah. i dunno, i don't pay enough attention to riot to offer a real explanation
NDAs are common in gaming and most IT-focused companies (at least in the US). This is because they deal in a lot of proprietary information and other forms of intellectual property. But yea, it might just be a US thing, I haven't worked outside of North America. ~ In regards to Deficio - just going off public information, we really don't know the extent of the situation (other than that Riot released and what Deficio has posted). Based on that information, as far as I can tell, they are treating it as a conflict of interest problem - which to me seems certainly understandable. It is not a typical employer/employee relationship here. The situation was that he is in a privileged position where he has the potential to influence outcomes of matches, and was approached by one of the teams and did not disclose it, and instead discussed it with various people. Personally, I think they overreacted, but we also do not know their specific policies regarding this. But even if one believes they overreacted or disagree with their decision, it seems like the goal of maintaining a healthy e-sports environment is consistent with putting the experience first. ~ I don't actually play League all that often, but every time I log in it seems like they have updated their client or some other aspect of the user experience. Recently they even announced a full UI rework. I don't know what you consider an "incredibly poor client" but this seems like one of those things that isn't an objective fact. I am sure you can find plenty of examples of people who've had problems, but that is the nature of technology and a larger userbase - people are going to have problems. Even within Apple's isolated framework it is still difficult to ensure your app works perfectly for everyone all the time. Things like the tribunal may seem like a small thing to you, but they have an entire department of people who work on this sort of thing. And while it may end up being one "small" feature to the players, the amount of time and effort expended on these things isn't trivial. You may or may not believe it, but "players first" is one of their founding principles - and they make sure you know that when you are working there. But I look at their patch notes and I see a ton of things they do that they don't have to or wouldn't do it if it was all about money grabs, and when I had a chance to sit down with some of their designers we spent several hours discussing how feedback systems (visual and audio) and how they could improve them for a better play experience (they recognize that effects spam and inconsistency is a major issue for them). Even their patch notes format... which is interspersed with explanations (whether you agree with them or not) is pretty impressive in this regard. As someone who used to be on the outside, and who is now on the inside, I can tell you it looks very different. Even just recently someone said that they have been waiting 8 years for Pox to do something that changed gameplay and wasn't just content... and it's just incredibly frustrating to hear that sort of thing because it's simply not true. And I am not suggesting Riot is perfect, or doesn't want to make money, but from my perspective they do plenty of things that aren't purely profit driven. And really, if they were truly trying to grab money, there's a ton more stuff they could do... League of Legends is poorly monetized, frankly, and they know it and even said it was intentional - and I believe them when they told me that because I know they could be making WAY more money than they are if they were even just a little bit more evil.
I've had frequent problems with unresponsive processes of their system. The multiple processes system they had/have? for the launcher lacked robustness. processes frequently died without telling their friends and their entire system locked up. Updaters not killing themselves and preventing others from launching etc. Closing things didn't solve anything and being forced to hunt down the processes in the system manager to really kill them was often the only solution to problems unless I wanted to do a fresh system boot every time something went wrong. In-game client was/is? often criticised for using a certain run-time environment with a bad rep. It's highly unlikely that all those people dissing the client have any idea why that is and are just using hearsay whenever they want to say something bad about Riot and make it seem more then just a rant. In-game client doesn't have a noticeable difference of bugs then any other mainstream program I've used. I wonder if these type of features have a positive or a negative impact on a game's image in the long run. After the initial newness wears of game-boards will often be filled with complaints about them: Tribunal is bogus lies. I had a troll/rager in my game. If it worked this wouldn't happen; Why can't I refund more times? I usually buy new champions and then refund them a bit later but I'm all out of refunds now and I bought a skin when I was drunk I don't like it, please refund!! There's a conundrum, I've noticed, with games giving free stuff and then players tend to do nothing but complain that they don't get more free stuff. Games that otoh never do this and only announce new cash shop items have the boards filled with people excited about buying them. This is where Riot's reputation as greedy comes from I think. Every time anything goes wrong and players don't get some free stuff it's because Riot became greedy and will do anything to prevent new free stuff from being released and that is the truth if you were to believe the official boards. Being to benevolent with your player-base seems counter-productive to actually be seen as good/benevolent. Best damage control for a game-company when something goes wrong is to ignore it unless it really goes wrong and then write a heartfelt apology explaining you're really working hard to prevent future/fix the problem. I recently read an interesting article about google and it's company motto: "don't be evil" Things can get perverted a bit.
It's funny, because when I said this, I had something completely different in mind than what you guys are discussing. I was more referring to gameplay issues, such as Nidalee's invisible spear bug that remain unfixed, CertainlyT being allowed to remain a designer in any capacity, their complete inability to balance the jungle items, their blatant favoritism of Lee Sin, Thresh, Zed, insertLCSBIGPLAYSchampionhere, and the hypocritical way in which they reworked Zilean, Veigar, Cass, and Twitch (i.e. they were completely gutted in the name of "balance and counterplay" while monstrosities like Kalista, Annie, Vi, and Zed continue to exist). They also have yet to address issues surrounding in-game trolls/afks/feeders, whereas DOTA at least has some kind of a system in place that isn't arbitrary punishment. Lyte is also an oblivious asshat for thinking he's done a bang-up job with the report function. But I guess the points that you guys bring up are good too.
